Grim Outlook at Polls for Poland's Solidarity

By Peter Finn, The Washington Post, Sunday 2
September 2001; Page A23

WARSAW—The economy that was the pride of Eastern Europe is
slumping. The government, battered by corruption charges and the
defection of some of its leading figures, is paralyzed. And
Poland's unhappy voters are in the mood for a house cleaning in
parliamentary elections later this month.

So strong is that mood that the governing Solidarity Electoral Action
center-right coalition is facing not just defeat, but
obliteration. Remarkably, the derivative of the founding party of
Polish democracy may end up with no seats in parliament, according to
opinion polls.

“We shall pay very dearly,” said Andrzej Wiszniewski, head
of Solidarity's election committee, who makes no pretense about
his party's single electoral goal in the Sept. 23 vote:
survival. Technically a coalition, Solidarity needs to secure 8
percent of the vote just to get into parliament; it is polling between
6 and 7 percent.

“We will lose power,” said Wiszniewski, minister of
science in the government. “But I am an eternal optimist, and I
can’t believe we will be out of parliament.”

The immediate beneficiary of Solidarity's likely collapse is the
Democratic Left Alliance, the communist successor party that has
transformed itself into a disciplined and moderate left-wing party
that supports NATO and European Union membership. One of the
party's founders, Alexander Kwasniewski, was easily reelected to
the presidency last year and control of parliament would hand the
Democratic Left Alliance, or Social Democrats, all the levers of power
in Poland.

But this election is less about the winner, a foregone conclusion, and
more about the coming shakeout on the center-right.

In recent months, two new parties have emerged on the right, and they
are threatening to permanently supplant Solidarity as the only viable
alternative to the Social Democrats.

“We think we are creating the modern right in Poland,”
said Andrzej Olechowski, a founder of the new Civic Platform, who came
in second in last year's presidential election in which the
Solidarity candidate was trounced. Legendary Solidarity founder Lech
Walesa, who broke with Solidarity and ran on his own ticket, got 1
percent of the vote in the presidential election, a humiliating result
and one that gave the lie to the notion of riding on history.

“We believe most of our following, and our future, is in the
growing Polish middle class,” said Olechowski, a quintessential
post-communist who has admitted passing on information to the old
communist secret police, but went on to become a Solidarity foreign
minister.

Civic Platform, which was created at the start of the year, is already
polling between 15 and 20 percent.

Combining economic liberalism and social conservatism, it is drawing
defectors from Freedom Union, a Solidarity affiliate that abandoned a
coalition with Solidarity last year.

To the right of Civic Platform is Law and Justice, a group created a
couple of months ago by twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw
Kaczynski. Lech Kaczynski was a popular justice minister in the
Solidarity government until he was fired by Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek
after a dispute between his ministry and the intelligence service.

It is already outstripping Solidarity, with 10 percent of the
electorate supporting it, according to polls.

Buzek's government has also been buffeted by a series of
corruption scandals in recent weeks. The deputy defense minister was
fired after one of his assistants, suspected of soliciting bribes, was
arrested as he reportedly attempted to flee the country with four
different passports in his possession.

The telecommunications minister was fired for alleged
“irregularities” in the award of cellular phone licenses
that may have cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars.

For years, Solidarity, uneasily uniting economic liberals, trade
unionists, nationalists and Catholic conservatives under an
anti-communist banner, has been a study in internal
rancor. Buzek's government, which united three parties with roots
in Solidarity, continued that tradition.

It botched the introduction of a series of major reforms in health
care and education, with the severest critics of its efforts emerging
from its own ranks. The reforms, Olechowski said, may benefit Poland
in the long run, but they created the impression of a government that
didn’t believe in its own policies.

At the same time, economic growth slowed this year to 2 percent from a
high of 7 percent in 1997, and unemployment rose to 16
percent. Foreign investment fell by nearly 50 percent this year. And
public confidence in the government soured to the point of contempt.

Now “we can expect the long dominance of the post-communists in
Polish political life,” said Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, a professor
of sociology at the Institute of Political Studies here. “The
coming elections will be a bitter lesson for the right here, and it
may finally force them to unite.”

But not, he thinks, under a renewed banner of Solidarity. The grand
old hero, spent as a political force, may revert to its original
identity—a trade union.